1

Grand Meeting at Sommarøya 2010

Paper abstracts


Invited speakers

Caroline Heycock & Antonella Sorace (University of Edinburgh):
Acquisition in variation (and vice versa)
In this talk we'll discuss our work on variation in Faroese, focussing in particular on the evidence of variability in the grammar of children acquiring this language, and situating the discussion against the background of other results concerning late variability in the acquisition of clausal structure.

Bruce Morén-Duolljá (CASTL, University of Tromsø):
TBA

Cecilia Poletto (Universities of Padua and Venice):
OV and VO in Romance: quantifiers, past participle agreement and aspectual distinctions
In this talk I will take into account the loss of OV from late Latin to Old Italian to modern Italian dialects. I will show that there is an implicational scale according to which VO orders first manifests themselves with definite DPs in late Latin while OV orders persist with (bare) quantifiers in Old Italian (and modern French). The same type of generalizations can be found in the literature concerning the Germanic area (see among others Svenonius (2004)). A second set of phenomena concerning modern Italian dialects shows that OV orders can also resist with definite DPs, if a resultative interpretation is selected and that there is a correlation between OV and obligatory Past Participle Agreement. Following Svenonius, I will adopt an analysis in terms of dedicated positions for the case of (bare) quantifiers. The case of obligatory Past Participle Agreement with OV will be interpreted as an instance of Guasti and Rizzi’s (2003) generalization: movement requires the highest overt Agreement pattern, Agree does not necessarily do so. If this line of thought concerning the progressive loss of OV on the one hand and its pertinacity on the other is correct, we do not need the double base hypothesis in order to account for this types of word order change: there are not two grammars that account for word order alternations, but a single one with distinct positions according to the type of object.

Helge Sandøy (University of Bergen):
The interaction of linguistic structure and language society
The dominating approach of structural linguistics is to focus on internal factors in language change, whereas sociolinguists prefer to enhance external causes to linguistic changes. And there is a tendency among the two schools to ignore and refuse the other's perspective. However, there are good reasons for including both perspectives in order to understand both specific linguistic changes and language faculty. I'll present and discuss both sociolinguistic ideas about social mechanisms having impact on linguistic structure and Norwegian structural data that can obviously account for changes that cannot be explained by social forces.

Bert Vaux (University of Cambridge):
Synonymy Avoidance and Information Theory
This paper surveys evidence for linguistic effects rooted in synonymy avoidance in language acquisition, dialect differentiation, borrowing, and historical change, and proposes an evolutionary information-theoretic hypothesis concerning the cognitive mechanism underlying this process. Data are drawn primarily from my four recent surveys of English dialects, augmented by materials from the acquisition and historical literature.


Other speakers

Leiv Inge Aa (NTNU, Trondheim):
Verb-particles in costal and inland dialects of Mid-Norway
I will present the data I have collected in the NORMS fieldwork in the Mid-Norwegian dialect area (around Trondheim). I have focused first and foremost on the distribution of verb-particles, kaste (ut) 'n (ut), and also if the light pronoun shift fits the pattern of light pronoun shift with negations. Adjectival particles, trampe (flat(t)) graset/det (flatt), will probably be looked at as well, and be compared with the prepositional particles. Finally, I'm interested in finding out if there is a system with dialects allowing and not allowing particle incorporation in participles, i.e. to what extent the participle has to agree with the subject.

Marianne Anderson (NTNU, Trondheim):
TBA



Mariachiara Berizzi and Silvia Rossi a (University of Padua):
A syntactic approach to the After-Perfect construction of Hiberno-English
In the After-Perfect construction (AFP) of Hiberno-English, the preposition after encodes retrospective aspect, as in “She’s after breaking the window”, meaning “She has just broken the window”. British English speakers interpret this construction as a future of intention. In this talk, the two different interpretations of the same construction (HE retrospective vs. BrE future-intentional) are taken to be the result of different structural positions hosting after within the PP structure as proposed by Svenonius (in press) and Cinque (in press). Such a syntactic analysis also sheds new light on the hypothesis of the origin of the AFP as a calque on a similar Irish retrospective construction.

Eefje Boef & Irene Franco (CASTL, University of Tromsø):
A comparative study of subordinate A'-dependencies
This talk presents an overview of the variation in the left periphery of (long) relative clauses and (long) embedded wh-questions in Scandinavian (Scandiasyn corpus and additional surveys) and West-Germanic (SAND corpus). We present the data and provide a tentative analysis of the variation regarding subject/object asymmetries and complementizer drop/insertion.

Tanya Karoli Christensen (LANCHART, University of Copenhagen):
Semantic variation. Reconsidering the boundaries between sociolinguistics and functional grammar
Semantic variation concerns a level of linguistic analysis which sociolinguistics has been largely blind to (with the notable exception of Ruqaiya Hasan), partly because of methodological difficulties in defining a stable frame within which meaning may vary. Functional linguistics, on the other hand, has shut its eyes to variation in order to be as clear as possible about grammatical categories. I will argue that both traditions will benefit from a broadened perspective in which both variation and category lay claims on linguistic descriptions and explanations. The talk will address methodological as well as theoretical issues related to this.

Anton Karl Ingason (University of Iceland):
Explaining Case Variation. A Death Rattle Hypothesis for Minority Rules

Ida Larsson (University of Gothenburg):
Passives and resultatives with BE in the history of Swedish

Jenny Nilsson (University of Gothenburg):
Observer´s paradox when catching to release
When collecting spontaneous spoken data in order to release, it is imperative that the informants do not discuss matters of a too private nature, for example things concerning other individuals who did not consent to participate in the study. In order to achieve this, the topic of conversation needs to be more formal than it might be in everyday conversation. The question then becomes: To what extent does a more formal setting affect informants’ use of dialect? As part of the project Dialect change in West Sweden I have investigated how the observer’s paradox affects the use of dialect in different contexts, and concluded that this problem is more significant in some cases than in others. In this presentation I discuss how we may minimize the effect of the observer’s paradox in data caught to be released.

Christine Bjerkan Østbø (University of Tromsø):
Negation across Scandinavian dialects

Jeffrey Parrot (LANCHART, University of Copenhagen):
Case variation in coordination across Danish and Norwegian varieties

Åshild Søfteland (University of Oslo):
Use of the subject function in spoken Scandinavian

Tania Strahan (University of Iceland):
TBA

Stig Rognes (University of Oslo):
TBA